Archive for the ‘Role Playing Game’ Category

Now a few years ago a famous game designer pointed out that all successful RPGs include zombies.  I think it was Robin D Laws but I could be wrong.  This was extended by others to suggest that a game could be made a success by including zombies.  Back then zombies were the preserve of horror and fantasy fiction, TV and budget horror films.  They were niche.  They were cult.  It wasn’t too many years before that time that rail adverts featured Jimmy Saville and the only undead on a train were the British Rail sandwiches.  We were told it was the Age of the Train.

Now British Rail and British Rail sandwiches don’t exist anymore. The fried breakfasts have been replaced with croissants and a full fat, ethical, posh coffee from a franchise on the renovated station.  You don’t have a brief encounter in the door with a woman as you’re both wearing backpacks and you’d get jammed in place if you tried to pass with a flirtatious smile.  Pretty soon new University students will have been born after BR was broken up.

The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Resident Evil and Shaun of the Dead have happened.  Zombies (along with Vampires and Werewolves) have become more and more mainstream.

Every day on my way to work this week I’ve faced by a Virgin Trains advert on a big screen featuring zombies…

Its now the Age of the Zombie.

So my question is are they now too main stream?  Are zombies past their sell by date?  Have they sold out  like an aging punk in an insurance advert with a million pounds in his back pocket?

What cool monster will fill the niche left by zombies?  Will it be another undead or something else?

Daneofwar asked a question on Twitter in the middle of Sherlock on Sunday night…

Why are fantasy ideas of settings based on the 19th century always so unoriginal? Steampunk blah blah blah goggles blah blah blah.

I didn’t have time for a long answer then (too busy watching Sherlock) but I think Brian has touched on a more fundamental question.  A question that is important for writers, world builders and setting designers.  Why are so many settings unoriginal? A good answer to that will also answer the question How do you avoid your setting being unoriginal? Or why are so many settings unoriginal?

There are quite a few possibilities.  One of the main ones being settings that are simply rip offs of someone else’s work with the serial numbers filed off.  There is a fine line between parodying a work, producing something in the same genre and simply ripping off the market leader in the hope of making some cash.  Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek and lots of things with Vampires in them rip offs I’m looking at you.  This isn’t the problem I’m interested in tonight.

The problem I’m interested in tonight is the And the Kitchen Sink setting.  There is a real art to knowing not just what to put into a setting but what to leave out.  There is a temptation when building a steampunk setting to include every trope that can be thrown in: flying ships, anachronistic machines, steam mechs, ninja, steam cars, zeppelins, difference engines, mad scientists, clockwork, magic, polished brass, psychic powers, corsets,  gears slapped on everything, monsters, steam powered potato peelers and inevitably goggles.  Of course this isn’t just a problem for steampunk; there are plenty of settings in other genres that have suffered the same fate.

I hate to pick out just one culprit when there are so many around but the game Waste World (Manticore 1997) sticks in my mind for trying to shoehorn as many science fiction ideas into one setting as was possible.

Its very easy with this approach to creating a setting to cram lots of cool stuff in without working out what its impact on the world really would be.  It can become a thick layer of makeup caked over the setting’s pretty face.

Personally I think a sounder approach is to build a setting up in small steps.  Heinlein’s Future History stories are a good example of this approach most add a few changes to the world with each step forward.  To pick four of the stories:

• The Roads Must Roll – Rolling Roads
• The Man Who Sold the Moon – Space Travel
• Delilah and the Space Rigger – Women in an all male environment
• The Long Watch – Moon based nuclear weapons

There are some that do add more.  If_This_Goes_On— has a post religious revolutions America, scram jets, social engineering and other stuff.  However it  was a novella so had more space to play with the ideas and there were three unwritten stories between it and its predecessor in the series The Menace from Earth.

My personal experience is that its easier to avoid adding stuff than it is to take it out.  Its also easier to take stuff out earlier in the development process than to do it later.  Avoiding adding something in also avoids wasting time on research and writing unnecessary material.

Plus if you’ve left something out and you wind up with a success on your hands you can follow Heinlein’s path and add each new thing in as you go along.

In The Danger of Difficulty Despair – With Graphs I talked about the risk of a game suffering from boring encounters if the difficulty progression was always identical.  I showed, with the aid of graphs, how linear encounter difficulty combined with character improvement at the end of each adventure could create a universe which sees the player characters improve but never lets them experience the improvement.  I’ll come back to that problem in a future post.  First I’m going to suggest a few alternative difficulty variations that can be used for adventures.

To quickly recap the linear difficulty encounter adventure is an adventure where a series of encounters occur starting with an easy one and building up to a harder one.  The difficulty of each encounter is roughly similar.

Capability and Linear Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

A common variation on this is the Swooping difficulty adventure where the difficulty starts out at a level, drops down and then rises for the climax.  My notes included a mention of the “extreme” swoops favoured by one of the DMs we played with who used a lot of very easy encounters and then towards the end things got really tough.

Swooping Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Extreme Swooping Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Another type of progression happens in dungeons built of areas (which may be levels) where several encounters of similar difficulty are grouped together followed by an area with harder difficulty and so on till the final, climactic encounter.

Stepped Dungeon Style Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Last time I said I’d talk about one of the worst games I ever played in.  I’d played in games run by the DM responsible before and he was usually pretty good.  Then came his experimental phase.  First a game where he let two of us generate nominally evil (really just not good) characters and then decided he wanted only the cleanest of clean characters.

Then came what I think can be best described as his attempt at a game combining psychedelic elements from 60s TV shows, American film musicals and Dungeons and Dragons.  He topped that strange combination off with difficulty so varied that I think it can be best described by this graph…

If you've read this far already you shouldn't need any explanation for this graph

It was just as frustrating for the players as the linear progression of difficulty.  Here the frustration came from the feeling that the world didn’t make sense.  It might be “realistic” but it lacked drama.  Players never knew when to heal and when to use their limited use abilities until it was too late.  We suspected there was a lot of dice fudging by the Dungeon Master going on so we didn’t get wiped out.  We stuck with the game for about five sessions and then, to our relief, it came to an (unsatisfying) end.

I was going through some very old gaming files from when I was at college and came across some notes on designing the difficulty of encounters in a tabletop role playing game. A few weeks ago I questioned if Role Playing Games Need XP and the notes reminded me that in a game with experience the characters can effectively not develop. That sounds like a contradiction but it can happen and it can be a problem. It happens when the difficulty faced by characters increases at the same rate as the characters improve and this can be frustrating for players.

In most table top RPGs experience, and character development happens between adventures characters’ capability develop something like this:

Character Capability against time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

A game with linear encounter difficulty is one where as the characters abilities increase so does the difficulty of the encounters they face. The characters may gain some advantage; they may hit their enemies harder or more often and may have more hit points. Unfortunately their opponents also now hit harder, more often and have more hit points. In its purest form every encounter has the same chance of their succeeding, as the last for characters. In fact, apart from a little colour in their encounters, they might as well have not improved at all and their opponents could have remained at the same power too.

Linear Difficulty over time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

So difficulty and capability always keep step with each other…

Capability and Linear Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Some games virtually encourage this style of adventure design by including charts or advice to allow referees to work out the ideal encounter for a group of X players of level Y to face. Charts and tables like that serve a useful purpose in helping new referees and those unfamiliar with a game to find their feet when designing encounters. The risk of building an encounter that will obliterate a group or underwhelm them is significantly reduced without having to resort to dice fudging or deus ex machina. There is a real risk of boredom if this type of difficulty progression is slavishly applied.

Others virtually rule out easy adversaries – I read one rulebook recently (forgive me I can’t remember which one) that said all “easy” encounters where the characters were guaranteed success should be role played rather than roll played. While I agree with that generally (although I hate the phrase roll play and its derivatives) doing this all the time means the players can never feel how powerful they are in a crunchy way.

I’m going to leave this here for now but I’ll be back soon with some other kinds of difficulty progression and some thoughts on one of the worst game I ever played in.

Update: Part 2 is now available Variations on the Difficulty Theme.

I’ve added entries for Dark Conspiracy, Twilight 2000 and Babylon 5 to the Open the Door page.

When making rules for a role playing game there is the ongoing balancing act between narrative and simulation.  Both of which ultimately need to create fun.  At one extreme you’ve a game like Over the Edge with very lightweight rule system and at the other end you’ve got rules heavy, simulation game like Rolemaster.  Both have their place and both have advantages and disadvantages.  A rules light game can be as hard to run (harder in some ways for a novice) than a rules heavy game.

When I wrote Under Stairs Over Stairs I deliberately decided that character development should be based on a character’s age not on how many fights they had been in.  However over the years some of the feedback I’ve had suggests some players would prefer an experience system.  They’re just more comfortable with games that keep the elements most games have like Statistics, Skills, Combat Rules, Experience Rules and buying equipment with cash.  The further a game moves from the comfort zone the less they like the sound of it.

Simulating an episodic TV shows before the story arc era of shows like Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer presents an interesting dilemma.  In that era, where episodic and serial TV shows were clearly separate, characters didn’t develop much from one episode to the other.  There were good reasons for this: channels could show the episodes in any order and repeat them in any order without having to worry about it.  Writers didn’t need coordinating so the story line maintained continuity.  Crucially it was felt the audience could miss an episode and then start watching again.

So in the game I’m running I’ve been talking to the players about how we can simulate this narrative style in-game since the setting is style after episodic TV shows.  Traditional experience systems see XP awarded and characters improving from adventure to adventure.  The game has that kind of system at the moment.  Episodic TV didn’t see characters changing and growing.  They usually began as fully formed heroes, at least once the pilot episode set them up, and then carried on in the same way for the rest of their dramatic lives.

I’ve been considering a few different approaches to take to this.  The first is simply to not bother with XP.  The second is to not bother with XP but to allow players to reshape their characters a little between episodes by moving skills or stats round till they are happy with the balance.    A slight variation on these possibilities is to give the players more points when creating their character’s so they start out better.  Many games are designed with the idea that the characters will become more powerful and thus deal with bigger challenges as time goes on so this would balance that out.

Another thought is to use XP but instead use it to buy prominence in an episode’s story or to buy central casting in the next episode.  I’ve seen this in a few games – role buying in Hong Kong Action Theatre springs immediately to mind.  I’m wondering if a system that allows the players to buy into the story could work. A little XP would net them a part in the adventure’s B plot.  A bit more would buy them a connection with a character in the story or being in the right (or wrong) place at the right time.  A really big spend in advance of the adventure would let them buy a pivotal position in the next adventure.

So would throwing out XP or using it in a different way make you less likely to be interested in a game?  How would you feel about buying a bigger role for your character in a game?

I’ve been writting the next adventure for the role playing game I’m occassionally running today.  As well as the traditional overhead map of one of the key locations I’m considering using elevations of the streets to help players visualise their surroundings.  The small sample above is a section from a trial elevation I sketched tonight.

I can’t remember ever seeing elevations used in any roleplaying game.  So I thought I’d throw the example out there to see what any gamers reading this thought.

I’m wondering if I should add textures to some of the surfaces or leave it as line art.  If I leave it as line are I’m thinking I’ll use different pen styles / weights to enhance the look.  I’m also wondering if I should include people and cars on the drawing.  Do you think I should add in postboxes, lamp posts, pedestrian crossings and other street furniture.  One detail that’s missing from the example: I’ll be including labels on the final elevations.  Is there anything else you’d suggest?

The rebuilding and post launch work on impworks is now pretty much done which means I can get back to other projects.  tonight I’ve taken an editing chainsaw to a 120 page text which is the core design for a game and so far I’ve cut it to 60 pages.  Now I’m at the hard part: cutting stuff I want to keep, stuff that took hard thinking or hard research.  I’ve a simple incentive.  I know that if I get this right and this text ends up in print then there is a chance I can see the cut material in print as supplements.

So tomorrow its away with the chainsaw and out with the pruning knife.

I’ve posted an updated excerpt from an article I wrote for Valkyrie Magazine issue 25: Open the Door on how characters go through doors in different games.

I wrote an article on heist movies, You’re Only Supposed to Blow the Bloody Doors Off!!! , for Valkyrie issue 25 several years ago. I’ve been working on game ideas related to that and to a detective based game for quite a while either as a role playing game or as a wargame. I’ve been struggling to find a way to resolve the problem of finding a clue hanging on a single dice roll. While I like Gumshoe system’s solution of no random chance to finding clues I don’t think it would work well in a wargame setting where players are pitted against each other.

Well tonight while I was watching Have I Got News for You an idea came to me and I’ve got three pages of scrawled notes. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll type them up and they’ll make some sense…